Colours in the Steel (41 page)

Below him, in front of his tent, a group of children were weaving carpet (carpets, soaked in water and slung over the frames of the siege towers, were going to counteract the enemy’s attempt to set them alight with fire-arrows, or, at least, that was the plan). They were working on a large vertical loom, squatting on a plank that rested on the rungs of two ladders, so that it could be raised as the work progressed. The children passed the weft thread between the rows of knots, their small hands moving quickly and neatly where a grown-up’s couldn’t go. At the front the old woman in charge of the job sang out the stitches, and the children repeated them after her as if learning a lesson. Even though it was a purely military artefact, designed to be shot through and scorched, the old woman couldn’t help laying a pattern into it; probably she knew no other way of doing the job - it’d take longer to work out how to make it plain than it did to make the pattern. A strange situation, Temrai couldn’t help feeling, when even old women, children and soft furnishings go to war.

Temrai the Carpet-Weaver . . .
He turned back and gazed at the city, as if he could melt those walls with his fiery glance. Maybe one day they’d say that’s exactly what he did. Quite; and if wishes were siege engines, he’d be a great big log. That was enough daydreaming for one morning; work to be done.

On the river side of the camp, there was something he felt he could really be proud of; a row of trebuchets, still glistening with the pitch that would keep the wet out and stop the joints from springing. They stood like a herd of thoroughbreds in a pen, waiting to be broken in, the pitching arms standing high in the air with the sling that held the stone furled round like a banner at rest before the charge is signalled. Each of them could hurl two and a half hundredweight the best part of two hundred and fifty yards, although the rate of fire was slow compared with a torsion engine, and it took an awful lot of men pulling on ropes to haul up the two-hundred-hundredweight of rock that formed the counterweight. The torsion engines would be ready soon (just as soon as we can make the ropes; oh, hell, how are we going to make the damned ropes? So much horsehair, so little time) and the component parts of the rams and towers were stacked neatly, ready for assembly. The rest of the gear, the things the enemy mustn’t see until later, was on its way down the river, trussed up in bundles to disguise the shape. Pretty soon, they’d have almost enough arrows (green wood and fletched with duck; we’ll be a laughing stock), enough bows, enough armour, enough horses, enough food, shirts, boots, belts, helmets, swords, crockery, helmet-liner laces, enough of every damn thing that went to make up a war. Now he even had something to count them all with; there would be a full census of the clan, for the first time ever. Soon, this great engine he’d built and wound up would slip its catch and go off, and nothing would ever be the same again.

It could be worse, he reflected soberly. I could still be living in the city when it got attacked.

Someone coughed politely behind him; it was the young lad, can’t remember his name, who was drawing maps. He seemed very proud of his handiwork, as well he might - neat, clear, accurate information carefully set out on parchment, everything you need to know about the lie of the land at a glance. He smiled encouragingly; the boy thanked him and carried the maps down the hill to the command tent, where the council of war was waiting. Time he was joining them himself; yet another meeting, the third today . . .

Uncle Anakai stood up when Temrai pushed through the tent flap. That seemed
very
strange and not quite right, but Uncle An had done it instinctively.
Maybe he knows something I don’t
, Temrai reflected, and made up his mind not to let it worry him. He sat down on the floor, yawned and asked if there was anything to eat.

‘Anything except salt duck,’ he added, as Mivren leant forward to unfasten the lid of her basket. ‘Too much of a good thing’s bad enough; too much salt duck is . . . Come on, there must be some cheese or something.’

Someone handed him a wedge of cheese and an apple. He attacked them while the heads of department reported progress. By and large, the news was good; problems that had seemed insurmountable yesterday were looking rather more manageable today, the various work parties were managing to co-operate and nobody had yet asked,
Why are we doing this?
The fletchers had somehow managed to turn the green wood into arrows that flew straight. Just when it looked like they were about to run out of hides for roofing over the battering rams and the siege towers, a hunting party everybody had forgotten about weeks ago had suddenly turned up at the downriver camp with forty mules laden with raw buckskins - by pure chance they’d happened upon a herd of some kind of large deer that only showed up on this side of the badlands once every forty years or so; the deer were completely unused to humans and stood still to be shot, gazing with blank incomprehension as their fellows dropped all around them.

Another party had found a substantial bed of osiers in a small combe that the clan had been passing for years without ever realising it was there; the perfect raw material for weaving shields and baskets, more than they could possibly use in a generation. A flash flood some way upstream had led to a blockage in the river; where the dry bed had been exposed for the first time ever, a scouting party had stumbled across a seam of best-quality clay, just right for making the close-grained, thin-walled jars Temrai had been demanding for this secret weapon of his that nobody was allowed to know about yet. Just when they’d been on the point of giving up on their search for a source of bulk naphtha, a raiding party had ambushed a merchant caravan carrying ten cartloads of the stuff. When the merchants realised that not only were they not going to be horribly killed, they were being asked to name their own price for a reliable supply, they’d been delighted to co-operate; the result was a thoroughly satisfactory deal, unpolished amber for naphtha, and the merchants had made the first delivery at the lower depot the day before yesterday. It was enough, someone remarked, to make you believe in miracles.

Temrai listened to all this good news, thought about it for a while, and then announced that at this rate, they’d be ready to move on to the assault camp in a week or two. Someone else said two weeks was pushing it, could he make it twenty days? Someone else said they ought to be able to meet the two-week deadline if everybody really knuckled down. There was a brief discussion; compromise, sixteen days from today, which would also be the full moon, ideal for the night march they were going to have to make if they wanted that extra advantage of surprise. At the full moon, then; agreed? Agreed. And that was that; Temrai the Great had spoken.

And that
, Temrai told himself as the meeting broke up,
is how things happen. Odd; I suppose I made the decision, though as I recall I was sitting with a mouth full of cheese at the time, when someone else said, ‘At the full moon, then.’ And now it’s decided, and one way or another, what’s going to happen will happen. And it’ll still all be my doing. Or fault. Whichever
.

He pushed through the tent flap and blinked in the bright daylight; and a moment or so later a man came running up to tell him he was needed urgently to sort out a technical problem with the mangonel winding ratchets.
Ah. More tinkering. That’s more like it
. He nodded, threw away his apple core and asked the messenger to lead the way.

 

‘And what’s that supposed to be?’ Loredan asked.

The engineer gave him a wounded look. ‘It’s the derrick for the drawbridge windlass,’ he replied. ‘It’s in perfect working order. I checked it myself only the other day.’

‘I see,’ Loredan replied, and gave it a gentle kick. The wooden frame shuddered and a bit fell off. ‘Get it fixed,’ he said wearily. ‘Properly, this time. And don’t explain why that’ll be difficult, because I don’t want to know.’

From up here, on the top of the western-side gatetower, he could see a flash of light from the high ground five miles or so away downriver; a spearhead or a helmet, or maybe just a brightly scoured cooking pot, happening to catch the sun at a moment he happened to be looking in that direction. His mouth twitched, and he mimed raising a hat in polite salutation.

Aside from odds and ends, like the heap of junk he’d just noticed and a few other bits and pieces, they were as ready as they’d ever be. From where he stood, he could see the masons dismantling their scaffolding around the new bastions, daringly sunk into the hard rock of that part of the river bed; it had been a bold, confident design, and it seemed to have worked (at least, it hadn’t fallen down yet). Two engines on each side of those clean, new wedges of stone could command a much broader field of fire, taking care of two notorious blind spots and effectively pushing the safety zone back by another fifty yards. That meant that anything within three hundred yards of the wall was within range; and not many bowmen could shoot over two hundred and fifty yards in a tournament, let alone in the middle of a battle, with half-hundredweight engine shot falling all around them.

He allowed himself a moment to admire the new masonry; unweathered, all the edges still sharp and uneroded, the mortar between the stones still slightly dark where it hadn’t quite dried out. His bastions were the first major addition to the walls in - what, a hundred years, a hundred and fifty? It’d be nice to think that in another hundred years’ time, they’d point them out as Loredan’s defences, maybe tell the awed and fascinated visitors a bit about Loredan’s war and how the enemy hadn’t stood a chance from the very beginning—

Listen to yourself, will you? You’re even starting to think like them
. He knelt down and gripped the wooden batten that was part of the mounting for a new engine, to be installed this afternoon. He couldn’t shift it; it’d do. He stood up again, looked out, visualised the arc of fire from this point, tried to imagine what it’d be like on the wall when the engine and the hoist for lifting up ammunition were in place, whether there’d be enough room to pass comfortably on the rampart walkway; traffic jams on the wall in the middle of an assault were a complication he didn’t want to have to face later. As Maxen used to say,
the worst thing a general can ever say is, I didn’t anticipate that
.

And then he remembered Maxen; so clearly that he could almost see him, as if he was standing there on the wall beside him. He remembered his broad, somewhat round face and his beard that never grew more than three-quarters of an inch, with an almost bald patch in the middle of his chin where it scarcely grew at all. He remembered his way of staying silent for a second or a second and a half after he’d been told something; then the invariable slight nod of the head, down and a bit to the side, always the same whether you’d just told him the camp was being overrun or the soup was ready. He wondered what Maxen would be doing now if he were commanding these walls, and hoped it would be pretty much the same as he’d done himself, though he doubted that.

And then he thought, all this is Maxen’s fault, when you come right down to it. Maxen’s fault, for doing his job, doing it as well as it could be done and with the resources available to him, doing it
heroically
well; but suppose that job didn’t need doing, shouldn’t have been done at all? If it’s safe to hide behind the walls now, it’d have been safe then, there was no need to take the war out onto the plains, there was no need to do what we did. And once we’d stopped doing it, nothing suddenly got worse; we weren’t suddenly up to our knees in shrieking savages, bashing down the gates to get at our wives and our table linen.

But Maxen did his job, never suggested to anybody that his job might not need doing; because that’s what Maxen was, the city’s one and only general. Did he stay out there in the plains, pouring away his life and the lives of others, simply because there wasn’t anything else he could do? Because he couldn’t face having to quit the army in his mid-fifties and try and find a proper job? What kind of man does a thing like that, entrench himself in the business of ending lives just because it’s the only way he knows of making a living?

Loredan considered the implications of that.
Yes, but I retired. Or I tried to. I made an effort to get out of that line of business, and here I am with the lives of all the city and all the clans in the palm of my hand. Gods, if I still had a sense of humour I’d find that amusing
.

He heard someone behind him; big, clumping boots. He recognised the sound.

‘Nearly done,’ said the engineer, Garantzes, puffing from the climb up the stairs from ground level. Too much cider and sitting at a drawing board. Loredan reflected smugly that he’d run up the steps two at a time and not even broken into a sweat.

‘Good,’ he replied. ‘I don’t think it’s a moment too soon, either.’ He pointed to the horizon, where a light was flashing. ‘How long before all the new engines are in place?’

Garantzes shrugged. ‘The day after tomorrow, at the latest. They’re all put together and ready to go - we’re turning them out at a rate of two a day in the arsenal; the big problem’s going to be finding enough wall to fit them all onto. The other problem is that we’ve only got two cranes big enough to lift them into position.’ He grinned sheepishly. ‘Forgot about that, in all the excitement. We’re building another two cranes, they’ll be ready tomorrow, with any luck.’

Loredan nodded. ‘The day after tomorrow will do fine,’ he replied. ‘The same goes for the fences.’

The fences had been his idea; or, rather, something he’d read about in a book, many years ago. According to the book, just before a sea battle a century and a half ago, the pirates of the Island had prevented the Perimadeian marines from boarding their ships by rigging up an arrangement of posts, projecting some way from the sides of each vessel, along which heavy-duty cables were strung like the bars of a post-and-rail fence. The result was that the marines’ boarding ladders had come to rest on the cables, not the sides of the ships, and all attempts at boarding had failed. Loredan figured the same technique might serve to protect the walls against scaling ladders. There was now a line of six-inch-diameter posts, each post seven feet long, projecting out of the wall all along the vulnerable zone where ladders might be set up. Over the next few days an iron chain would be strung along the line, and the workmen from the Office of Works were arguing fiercely among themselves as to who should, and shouldn’t, have the dubious privilege of shinning along a seven-foot pole like a monkey to hang upside down over a sheer drop into the river to attach the chain to the staples.